Exponential Festival: Unexpected Theater in Unfamiliar Real Estate

Meet the newlyweds, Buck and Sam. Buck is the prickly one, high-maintenance and given to political rants. Sam is the half of the couple who comforts and soothes. And in “Pillowtalk,” a handsome relationship pas de deux written and directed by Kyoung H. Park, much gentling is required.

“I’m a killer ballerina!” Buck says, rising onto the balls of his feet and arcing his arms above his head, because really he’s in a bit of a mood. But, in fact, the sleepless, quarrelsome night that unfolds before us will end in a dance. Poking and prodding at questions of love, identity and safety in a hostile world, Mr. Park is fusing naturalistic drama with ballet.

“Pillowtalk” is one of two shows I saw recently at the Exponential Festival, whose raison d’être is presenting local theater artists — which, in New York, the capital of the American stage, sounds about as specific as a program in Los Angeles devoted to local filmmakers. But in a festival-rich month, rife with productions that arrive from elsewhere, the Exponential Festival does serve as a showcase for the kind of experimental theater that thrives in the small, somewhat obscure performance spaces of Brooklyn and Manhattan — more in this city, surely, than anywhere else in the nation.

“Pillowtalk,” presented by the Tank and Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, at the Tank’s new home on West 36th Street, begins at the end of a bad day for Buck (JP Moraga). He’s just been laid off from his job as a journalist, and if it was mind-bogglingly naïve of him not to realize the shaky state of the media industry, it fits with his blind idealism, which he couples with jejune politics.

Buck is the kind of person who tells his new spouse that “marriage excludes, rejects and isolates the single people in our lives.” Does it, though? He would drive almost anyone up a tree.

“This is why wives murder their husbands,” Sam (Basit Shittu) says, charmingly, and we can only sympathize.

With its geometric lines of white light tracing a spare black-and-white set (both are by Marie Yokoyama), “Pillowtalk” is a beautifully designed production, held gently aloft throughout by Helen Yee’s atmospheric original music. When Katy Pyle’s choreography meets Andrew Jordan’s strappy, Day-Glo dance costumes, they make a drama all their own.

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Ryan William Downey, foreground, and the cast of “Everything of Any Value,” at the Parlour in Manhattan.CreditWalter Wlodarczyk

The play is front-loaded, though, with diatribes by Buck that are tedious and untheatrical, even if you agree with them. Yet “Pillowtalk” is a political work, and feels very much of this moment. Buck is Asian-American, Sam is African-American, and they are two gay men trying to build a marriage and a life together.

What gets in their way — what keeps them up at night — is that it’s never just the two of them in bed together. The effects of all the homophobia in the outside world climb in after them. So do the strains and legacies of racism that each lives with every day, and sometimes unwittingly inflicts on the other. Given all of that, how do they create a space for themselves that not only feels secure but also holds the hope of a future?

“Everything of Any Value,” the other show, produced by Title: Point, that I saw at the Exponential, provides one of the collateral pleasures of a festival scattered throughout the city: the chance to see the inside of some unfamiliar real estate. In this case, that was the Parlour, a second-floor space overlooking Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district.

The plotless performance begins in the capacious front room, then soon moves into the bi-level back room. That wealth of acreage may contribute to the excessive looseness of this technically ambitious production (with projections by Scott M. Ries and sound by Ryan William Downey), which has the feel of a work in progress that has yet to cohere.

Directed by Theresa Buchheister, who proves the most magnetic of the seven actors, the production has flashes of clarity, tinged variously with dread or delight. The script (by Ms. Buchheister, Spencer Campbell, Mr. Downey, Catrin Lloyd-Bollard and Mr. Ries) has even more, including this delectable stage direction for a scene that works better than most: “They are executives in a boardroom constructed entirely out of coded stupidity.”

The influence of experimentalist forebears — Mac Wellman, Thornton Wilder — is palpable, and the show is playful with language and intonation, eager to juxtapose sense with nonsense. (“Lube of nuts bisects stolen tea,” someone says. Well, yes. Naturally.) That can be fun, but more often it’s just chaotic.

Early on, the actors crouch among the audience members, their voices overlapping into a murmur. “There is one thing I want to be clear on,” they tell us. “It all makes sense.” Except this doesn’t. Not so much.